Conservation and management of electrical power are a growing concern with regard to both cost and environmental impact. Lighting represents approximately one-third of electricity use in commercial buildings and more than one-half in lodging and retail. Commercial general lighting (troffers, linears and similar fixtures) light over 60% of the floor space in the US. Therefore lighting systems seem to have the largest potential of any known system to reduce the energy use.
To address the issue of energy conservation, the use of energy efficient light emitting diodes (LEDs) for illumination is beginning to emerge as a lighting source. Apart from being energy efficient, LED lights have a long life, are durable and operate over a wide temperature range. Light emitting diode (LED) arrays are becoming more common in many applications as they are used to replace less efficient incandescent lamps.
While replacing the conventional light with LEDs leads to substantial amount of energy saving, other factors such as turning off the lights when not needed can be used as an option for saving the light energy. The requirement of light in an establishment depends on numerous factors including application, site orientation and occupation, building design, interior reflectances, occupant behavior, and tuning and configuration during installation and commissioning, As a result, there is significant interest in reducing lighting energy use through more efficient lighting systems, including controls. Electrical utilities and building codes are increasingly mandating that occupancy, daylight harvesting, demand response and other controls be included in new construction and retrofit projects.
The electrical power for LED is obtained from AC mains (120/277V AC, 60 Hz) feed in to a power converter that converts the alternating line voltage to DC, or pulsing DC, for powering the plurality of LEDs. Whereas the control equipments operate on a DC constant voltage in the range of 10-24 V DC. Therefore for installing LED fixtures and the control equipments, separate wiring has to be framed in the building architecture resulting in enhancement in the erection and commissioning state.
The cost associated with the purchasing and installing the lighting fixtures in a building is very high; which is further increased when controls are wired along with the lighting fixtures. Further addition of emergency lighting controls in the lighting system increase the cost to a significant amount. Thus the total cost per square feet for commissioning the control equipments is very high.
Therefore in view of aforementioned limitations, the present invention provides an apparatus that reduces the fixture installation cost by simplifying the wiring and reducing the safety hazard such that a less skilled, lower cost workforce can install the product; to provide the controls wiring as standard with the fixture and to provide the emergency power function with minimal incremental cost (primarily the cost of the batteries).